Rocky Recalled

A eulogy and some questions

"My friend, my older brother, my inspiration and my guide." So former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger described his feelings about Nelson Rockefeller in an eloquent, emotional eulogy at the funeral service in Manhattan's Riverside Church last week. While President Carter, former President Ford, Vice President Mondale, Chief Justice Burger and many other public figures listened from the nave, Kissinger paid tribute to the man who "permeated our lives."

In a voice that often quavered, Kissinger declared: "That Nelson Rockefeller is dead is both shattering and nearly inconceivable. One thought him indestructible ... When the phone call came last Friday, it seemed that our relation ship had just started. And now it was already ended." Rockefeller, continued Kissinger, was "full of the moment and yet always somehow marked by destiny. He often seemed remote because he was already living in the future, which most of us had not yet understood . . . His failure to reach the presidency was in my view a tragedy for the country, yet I never heard him express even one word of disappointment."

This heartfelt homage concluded a week in which the circumstances of Rockefeller's collapse had provoked some unusual speculation. In discussing the matter with reporters shortly after Rockefeller's death on the night of Jan. 26, his longtime press secretary Hugh Morrow said that only a security aide was present when Rockefeller was stricken at 10:15 p.m. while working on an art book at his office in Rockefeller Center. The phone call that summoned police, said Morrow, had been placed by an "unidentified woman neighbor." It soon turned out that Morrow had his facts wrong.

Rockefeller did not die in his office but in his mid-Manhattan town house, at 13 West 54th Street. The phone call was made at 11:16, not at 10:15. And the caller was not an unknown woman but a quite familiar one to Rockefeller and his associates: Megan Marshack, 26, a research assistant who had been helping Rocky with various publishing projects and who lived just down the street in an apartment building at 25 West 54th Street.

Before joining Rocky's staff in 1976, Marshack had worked for Associated Press Radio in Washington for six months. Her former boss at A.P. Radio, Bill McCloskey, recalled her as an "aggressive news gatherer who came over classy. She was bright and ambitious, but not in the negative sense."

The contradictory statements about when the call was made to police raised the question of whether an hour had elapsed between the time that Rockefeller died and the time of the call. To judge from Marshack's somewhat hyterical conversation, which was taped by the police, Rocky's seizure had just occurred. That also was the verdict of the medical examiner. Morrow, who was not present, issued a series of corrections to his previous accounts, then declined further comment. Marshack went into seclusion.

Another misconception had been caused by Rocky himself. He was not as healthy as people thought. In fact, he was being treated for heart disease brought on by hardening of the arteries, but he had not wanted to tell his family.

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